Punishing Lords of Baseball Along With Their Fallen Idols

Many are calling on Alex Rodriguez to drop his lawsuits against baseball and ride off into oblivion. His critics are clamoring for A-Rod to take his medicine.

But what about Major League Baseball? When will baseball, which only belatedly acknowledged its role in creating the steroid era, take its medicine? Rodriguez, judging by his comments earlier this week, appears ready to take his. He said Wednesday that baseball might have done him a “big favor” by ordering him away from the game for a year. Maybe now he can do a favor for the game itself.

By continuing his bare-knuckle resistance to baseball in court, Rodriguez, for the first time in a self-absorbed career, could do something to benefit the greater good. He could continue pushing back against baseball’s assault on players’ rights and, at the same time, galvanize a once powerful, but lately listless, players union.

Baseball’s pursuit of Rodriguez was aimed as much at exploiting a vacuum of leadership in the union as at targeting a cheat. The most rabid fan and the most casual observer should be troubled by how baseball’s emboldened investigative unit snared its man, employing unsavory tactics to establish Rodriguez’s guilt.

■ Baseball paid for stolen documents that it used against Rodriguez.

■ Baseball threatened to sue an uncooperative witness, Tony Bosch, to persuade him to cooperate with its investigation.

■ Baseball bullied other players to accept their punishment or risk retaliation.

Rodriguez is disliked, even by fans of his own team, but the public is discerning enough to know that baseball alternately encouraged, turned a blind eye to, and profited from the scourge of performance-enhancing drugs. Now baseball seeks to punish and banish the players who are the symptoms of the malady baseball once fostered.

“There are no good actors in this,” said the Rev. Rhonda Rubinson, priest-in-charge at the Church of the Intercession in Harlem. “Everybody is motivated by self-interest: Major League Baseball, Bosch, the players union, A-Rod, his handlers, his attorneys.” Everybody, she said, is looking for a way to cover up their own mistakes.

Rubinson was born in New York at midnight on an October day in 1958. During her mother’s labor and delivery, the obstetrician kept the radio on so he could hear a Yankees-Milwaukee Braves World Series broadcast. “My mother said, ‘Excuse me, I’m giving birth here, could you turn the radio off?’ ” Rubinson said. “He said, ‘The Yankees are coming back, I can’t turn it off now.’ So I literally was born into the Yankees.”

She has been a fan ever since. Rubinson attended her first Yankee game at age 5 — a doubleheader at the Stadium against the White Sox. She has a collection of 8,000 baseball cards and mountains of Yankees memorabilia. She once saw Steve Hamilton throw up on the mound after he swallowed his chewing tobacco. She lived through the team’s wife-swapping scandal in 1973.

But nothing, she said, approached the drama surrounding Rodriguez.

Rubinson probably spoke for many fans when she discussed her ambivalence about the fight between Rodriguez and M.L.B., and her sense that baseball was complicit in the steroid scourge it is now attempting to clean up. She said she does not like A-Rod, but she does not like baseball’s leaders, either.

“When big money gets involved with something like this,” she said, “there is an incentive to cheat and an incentive to protect cheaters. Baseball did that for years and years. You can’t tell me that they didn’t know what Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and those guys were doing. But the show was good, the money was coming in, people were watching, people were energized, and it led to more money and more incentive.”

During the last several months, Rubinson said she had filtered Rodriguez through a different prism. She no longer sees him as a baseball player but more like baseball’s Michael Jackson. “Absolutely the best at what you do, incredibly beyond in ability,” she said. “A lifestyle so cut off from the rest of the world that you begin thinking in your own universe. You’re the center of that universe; you feel you can get away with things that nobody else can get away with. Rules don’t apply. Doing things to your body that are eventually going to come back to haunt you, not realizing the impact you’re having beyond your own career. And not even feeling particularly guilty.”

She added: “When your universe revolves around yourself, you’re going to get into a situation where nobody is going to be there to hold your hand. Unless your self-interest meshes with somebody else’s self-interest, you will wind up alone.”

In many ways, that is Rodriguez now — suspended by baseball and, perhaps, unwanted by the Yankees.

But there is a way he can salvage his name. He can continue to challenge M.L.B., which long ago put the union on the defensive over drug testing and now, emboldened by its victory over Rodriguez, could be positioned to trample the rights of guilty and innocent alike in the fight over steroids or any other issue.

Rodriguez is difficult to cheer for in good times, and he is difficult to sympathize with in bad. But fans — and even his fellow players — have to focus on the merits of his battle and not be distracted by the flaws of the fighter.

Rodriguez has a duty to challenge baseball’s ability to act with impunity, and he has a responsibility to galvanize a badly compromised players association, whose strength had long been its unity.

The Golden Boy and the sport that created him should take their medicine together.

Email: wcr@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D5 of the New York edition with the headline: Punishing the Lords Along With Their Fallen Idols. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe